Monday, January 11, 2016

Neil Demause for the Village Voice says the Brooklyn real estate debacle known as Barclays Center is a money-loser that hasn't brought any new businesses or housing to the area that wouldn't have come there anyway. (Demaus credits Atlantic Yards Report blogger Norman Oder with digging out the financials.) Ratner recently sold his last bit of Barclays to Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov.

Demause says, "As for Brooklyn residents, we now have a terrible basketball team to watch, and a pretty decent hockey team, and a garish arena and some growing housing towers on a site that otherwise would probably have something similar anyway, given that pretty much every possible site in Brooklyn now has a ginormous apartment building going up on it..."

He ends, "It’s probably too simplistic to say of the Brooklyn arena that everybody ended up a loser, but we certainly haven't seen any slam-dunk winners yet. So for now, man, is this turning out to be an epic train wreck, or what?"